


and all the lovers at war

by eudaimon



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-18
Updated: 2013-05-18
Packaged: 2017-12-12 06:03:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,178
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/808139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eudaimon/pseuds/eudaimon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes, it feels like his entire life is wrapped in the way his parents met.  Separated from Sulu, Chekov's heart aches.</p>
            </blockquote>





	and all the lovers at war

_I walked through walls to be with you..._

Star-eyed, moon-kissed, gorgeous boy and his. They are inextricably linked; that much is clear. They form a matched pair. They find it fascinating but, then, they were designed to think of themselves only in terms of _part_ and _whole_. They have separated the two of them to see what happens; whether they wilt or flourish or maintain a flat-line. They hum to themselves while they go about their business, check the feed that keeps him immobile and the port and the feed which downloads. Theirs is an ages-old song, and they are only the smallest most insignificant part of it.

His lips part. His breath fogs the cold air. They keep it cold because they function better in the cold. Blue-edged, he looks like a thing made out of sky or atmosphere. They have seen these things in pictures. They are far from surface, but the signal is difficult to stop.

He mumbles one word in chemical sleep.  
They have no concept of such things, and no way to comfort him.

*

He wears himself out, tearing at walls that he can't see. Invisible, they bloody his knuckles all the same. He sits in the corner of the cell with his wounded hands cradled between his thighs. There's a split in his lip and he chews on it, tastes blood. It should have been fine; at first glance, the city had been deserted and they'd moved through it slowly. From time to time, Sulu's shoulder had bumped against his. Chekov had his mouth open to say something and he'd been aware of an electric buzz, a stutter right on the edge of his earring. A jazz murmur similar to the music that Sulu played in quarters, dancing in half circles while he records his pilot's log. Chekov had started to speak but then Sulu's eyes had widened and Chekov had reached out for him with both hands. Too late. His eyes had rolled up into his head. He'd fallen.

Something had smashed Chekov in the face. He hadn't seen anything coming.  
He had fallen, too.

The cell is twelve feet by six and a half. He walks it until he is exhausted by the smallness of the distance. He divides it all of the ways that he can, but it still makes no sense. The extra half a foot is an act of peculiar and particular cruelty. He sinks down onto the floor and cradles his head in his hands. He has seen no jailors, and so his anger has no place to go. He seethes with it. His body is written in a language of tight lines. He rubs the back of his neck. If Sulu is dead, he'll never forgive himself. If Sulu is dead, he'll find a way to render this whole planet down to rubble and dust. It wouldn't be too difficult. Mass-destruction comes down to physics, in the end.

He looks up.  
He looks up and she is already standing there.

For a long time, his Papa kept all of the photographs and so there were no pictures of her in the flat in St Petersburg. They existed; of that much, Chekov was certain, but his father had kept all of them in a drawer in a desk which he had made with his own two hands. Chekov had had one picture of her, tucked away, a picture taken by his father on a sunny day by the Neva, the breeze pulling at her curls, the floral skirt sticking against her legs and dragging out against the stones. She had one hand up to push her curls back from her face and she'd been smiling, the other halfway to her mouth. Beneath her shirt, the soft curve of a belly; there was a baby pressing against her skin...her first, her only boy. Him. That photograph was pinned to the wall in his quarters on the Enterprise.

No walls, no jailors.  
Only a dead woman standing in a non-existant doorway.

"Hello, Mama," he says.

Marta Chekovna smiles the exact same smile that was on her face that day by the river. It's a soft smile, hazy and half-focused. His hands hurt as he pushes himself up off the floor. She steps through the cell wall as though it isn't there. She reaches out and touches his face. Her fingers are cool and dry and Chekov wonders what would happen to him if he leaned against it with his whole body instead of pushing against it with only his hands. 

It can't be true, as inexplicable as that extra half foot, but, for a moment, Chekov can't care. He stands there, quietly, and lets his mother touch his face.

"Why are you here?" he asks her, and his voice feels as raw as his knuckles. He can't look her in the eye. On a long chain around her neck, there's a locket that he knows should contain a photograph of him and his sisters. The last time he went home, that locket was hanging on a nail in his father's workshop. She wasn't wearing it that day by the Neva. It was ten years and five babies away.

"I'm going to sit with you," she says, quietly. "Until they're ready too let you go home."  
"What about Sulu?" he asks her.  
"They'll let you go home," she says.

They sit with their backs against the solid concrete and look out across the vastness of what appears to be a cargo bay of some kind. Pools of light on the dark floor. A computer console of some kind on one wall. It holds his attention for a moment before she touches the back of his hand.

"The last time I saw you, you were eight years old," she says. "You were leaving for school. You had a little leather bag and your hat was pulled down so low that you almost couldn't see."

"That's true," he says. He had had one of his sisters by the hand and they'd kissed their Mama goodbye and, before he left to go to school, Chekov had run back and put Tolstoy up on the bed beside her. He'd left her there and gone to fetch his school-bag from beside the front door.

"You were gone by the time I came home," he said.  
"I wanted to wait."

He turns to look at her. For a moment, he studies the side of her face. Her profile mirrors her own. His father used to tell him that, of six children, only one recalled the woman that had brought them into the world. It was like she'd known what was coming. It was as though she had cradled him to her breast and passed something on.

He stares at her for a long time.

"This can't really be happening," he says. "You can't really be here. You look exactly like you look in the only photograph that I have of you and Hikaru must have seen that photograph a thousnad times. You know that story because I told him that story. They're doing this. You're them."

She blinks three times in a row. A tear overspills one eye and fades into nothing halfway down her cheek. Glitch in the programme. Ghost from the machine.

"We'll let you go," she tells him. "We mean you no harm. We'll keep him. Half a pair. You'll find another mate."

It's only then that it occurs to them that they've been speaking English all along. He's not even sure that his Mama spoke even more than a few words of English, back in Piter. She looks like she's twenty-two. At twenty-five, a star fell and became lodged behind her eyes. Mass-destruction based in physics.

"I don't want another mate," he says. "I want him."  
"Pasha, I..."  
"Don't call me that. You're not her; you just think you are."

They sit in silence for a moment. His eyes are back on the computer console on the wall. His brain is ticking over. The fingers of his free hand tap against the floor.

"Do you remember my father?" he asks her. "Do you know about my father?"  
"Of course," she says. Her eyes are wide and bright. He takes her hand and holds it.  
"His whole life, my father loved nobody but you," he says. "He never took another wife, he never loved another woman. Just you. Always you. For a long time, he found it very, very hard to look at me, because I looked so much like you."

Tears make it hard to talk, but he swallows hard and perseveres. He has to make this work. For Sulu, he has to make this happen.

"One day, he came to see me in San Francisco. We stood on the bridge. I introduced him to Hikaru. He said that he was happy that I'd found something like he had with you." His hand tightens around hers. "You have to help me, Marta. I won't leave here wtihout him."

She's crying again. The tears melt away like snow.

"For Andrei?" she asks him.   
"For him," says Chekov.

Her chin takes on a stubborn tilt that he recognises from the mirror. She gets up and holds out both her hands to him. She pulls him to his feet and he's surprised by her strength. His Mama must have been a strong woman; she screamed six children into the world before it was time to go.

She left the world sixty years ahead of time.  
She walks through walls like they aren't there.

"I remember the day on the bridge," she says, her fingers hovering against the console. "There was a breeze blowing. The river smelt good and your father was happy. We danced across the Neva and then we ate dinner before we went home."

He nods.

"He told me," he says. "You both told me."  
She presses the button. The walls flash electric blue and he can feel it when they've gone. He steps forward.

"I love you, Pasha," she says.   
This time, he doesn't correct her. 

The light in the bay changes and, somewhere in the flickering, Marta's gone but Pavel Chekov did all of the grieving he could ever bear to do for his Mama and there is a job to do here. The system is relatively simple; he can find his way. The robots are a hivemind. He can make this work. He isolates the part of the system that he wants. Once, a long time ago, he sat in his chair on the bridge and watched Sulu's vital-signs leap and sing. For a moment, on a different monitor, he watches it again.

He pulls the connection.  
Everything goes dark.

When she was young, Marta Niklovna was a runner. It was another thing that she gave to her first born son, along with the colour of his eyes and the tilt of his jaw. He runs through dark corridors, fumbling his communicator out of his pocket. They had been blocking the signal but it has to work now. It _has_ to. He has no idea how long he has.

He could cry for joy when he hears Uhura's voice on the other end of the line.

"We're going to beam you out," she tells him.  
"Give me a minute, please," he says, breathless, still running. "Let me find him first."

He finds him, lying in a chair. His head is tipped back and Chekov eases the connection out of the back of his head. His hair is ragged and cut at the back. The tiny robots crunch under foot like newly fallen snow.

At night, they lie together in a wide bed and Chekov tells stories. In his stories, there is always a sound to falling snow.

"Pavel?" asks Sulu, his voice dry and painful, his eyelashes fluttering. "Is that you?"  
"It's me," he says, pulling him close. "We're ready to beam up."  
"What?" asks Sulu, but it's too late.

They're already gone.

*

In the middle of the late watch, Sulu sits in the middle of the bed, pale and unsteady but alert, with Tolstoy cradled in his lap. Chekov steadies him with a hand on either side of his neck and, carefully, so carefully, Uhura shaves his head. His hair will grow back in time and wounds become scars in time, given air and time and space to heal.

They have time and space.

Afterwards, he gets up on the bed with Sulu, wrawpping both arms around him and holding him close.

"Tell me a story," says Sulu, quietly, and he means _I'm not sure I can sleep but I'm so glad that you're here_.  
"What story?"  
"Tell me the one about your parents on the bridge," and he has approximately eight-hundred stories about his parents on a bridge over the Neva, but almost all of them start in exactly the same way.

"There was a breeze blowing. The river smelled good. And my father was happy," he says, and then he takes it on from there.


End file.
